Sometimes it is necessary to create offline versions of a page or a complete website. For example you might want to put an offline version of a site on your USB stick for a presentation. Or perhaps you need to create static backups of your site.

Today I’m going to describe how to download pages and/or complete sites onto your linux server or desktop computer. wget is the Linux command you’re looking for and here is how to use it:

Downloading a single file (without linked elements such as images):
wget http://www.google.com

Downloading a complete page (including linked elements such as images):
wget -p http://www.google.com

Downloading multiple complete pages (up to 7 levels):
wget -rkpl 7 http://www.google.com

Downloading (mirroring) a whole site (up to 10 levels):
wget -m 10 http://www.google.com

Don’t leave for the weekend before upgrading your WordPress blogs to version 2.5.1. The security update has just come out.

I’m super busy with client work so I don’t have time to blog at the moment. In the mean time I would like to recommend you a post by Timo Aden of Google. He is explaining the secrets of the new version of the Google Analytics code. The post itself is in German but if you read the code you should understand what he’s talking about. Go to Timo’s post about the new code.

Gratulations to Hungary. Yahoo! is acquiring Indextools. The company offers a hosted web analytics suite including sophisticated conversion tracking. The company and the servers are based in Hungary. They’ve got sales people in Western Europe and North America as well.

Indextools was founded by Marton Szoke, a Hungarian entrepreneur with a degree in business administration but also a lot of technical knowledge. He spent some time studying in Vienna so he’s also fluent in German. Marton is a great guy and one of the very few CEO’s that take part in the development and management of their product.

After Google acquired Urchin, their analytics system became Google Analytics and also got linked with Adwords. Now that Microsoft introduced their own analytics solution, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Indextools as the future Yahoo! Analytics. The only problem: Currently Indextools is a fee-based service and clients with lots of traffic pay Indextools big money. I can’t imagine th

In his keynote at the last Affiliate Summit, Jason Calacanis described how affiliate marketers, or better spammers, destroyed a whole medium. The usenet provided a great platform for online discussions. It supports most features that you can find in emails: threads, attachements, (fake) addresses, you name it. I remember the days when the usenet was pretty much the only place where people gathered for discussions on the internet.

However, around the year 2000 most news groups got polluted with so many spam posts that people started leaving the usenet and moved on to discussion boards on websites. From a user point of view that was a step backwards. Instead of reading targeted groups on usenet we now have to monitor hundreds of different sites to stay updated on all these discussions. I think that’s one of the reasons why the use of RSS spread so quickly.

Today the usenet is used mainly by computer nerds that are sophisticated enough to run spam filters in their news readers and use the system also as a file-sharing platform. Normal people don’t use it and internet beginners don’t even know what it is. Today’s teenagers went straight to the world of Internet Explorer, MySpace and Facebook to exchange text.

I think the same thing is about to happen to email. Even with the best spam filters it’s become impossible to keep all the spam away. People are forced to delete stuff from their inboxes and look for real messages in their junk folders manually everday. What a waste of time and money for any economy. Just like with usenet, people are escaping the open email protocol and move to serviced portals.

Instead of exchanging email addresses, people communicate increasingly via social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or XING. The advantage is that they don’t have to keep up with changing email addresses, the contacts will always be there. Usually they can receive messages from approved contacts only, a whitelist system so to say. Compared to email, spam on social networks is still minimal and that’s why people love it. The downside is that different people are registered on different networks. So instead of using my email interface I have to check accounts in five different social networks to communicate.

From a technical standpoint email is still a great service. I like the separation of header and body so that you can view the topic and perhaps read the text of the message without having to download the attached file. That’s especially good for mobile communication. But I think once a solution is found for managing accounts of multiple social networks, email is going to be buried. Let’s see what OpenSocial will contribute.

If you still think email is the internet’s main communication medium, then you’re basically an old-school, web 1.0 person. Ask your 14-year old niece how often she logs on to Facebook and how often she uses email. You’ll be surprised. If you are an affiliate marketer and still spam the crap out of people, you’re not gonna be able to reach many young people soon. It’s like with online vs. offline advertising. Young people hardly buy newspapers and spend more time online than in front of the television.

Many affiliates run multiple WordPress blogs on the same server. It’s necessary to update your installations regularly as WordPress is an extremely vulnerable piece of software. Manual updating costs too much time, so here’s some Linux shell code for you. My script assumes that the document root of all WordPress installations on that server is at /srv/www/htdocs/DOMAINNAME/wordpress.

1. We download the WordPress source code:
unlink source_en.zip
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
mv latest.zip source_en.zip

2. We run backups of the old system, extract the new version and restore the old sitemap.
for domain in example.com anotherexample.com lastexample.com
do
rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old
cp -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old
unzip source_en.zip -d /srv/www/htdocs/$domain
cp /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old/sitemap.xml /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress
done

You also want to keep your plugins updated. You will need to collect the sources from various sites on the internet and put the extracted versions in a “plugins” folder on your sever. With the following script you can deploy the contents of your plugins folder (which you keep up to date manually) to all of your WordPress installations:
for domain in example.com anotherexample.com lastexample.com
do
rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress/wp-content/plugins
cp -r plugins /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress/wp-content
done

Good luck and happy blogging.

In a previous comment I was asked to post a backup procedure that I use on my root servers. The following is a backup stategy that I use on my SuSE servers.

Backup directories

You create the following directories:

• /root/backup/scripts
• /root/backup/files

Hourly backup script

Create /root/backup/scripts/1h.sh with the following contents and make it executable:
tar -czf /root/backup/files/partial_`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M`.tar.gz `find /etc /home /srv /var -type f -mmin -60` 2> /dev/null
find /root/backup/files -name 'partial*' -mtime +7 -exec unlink '{}' \;
This creates backups of files that were changed in the past 60 minutes. Also it deletes those hourly backups that are older than 7 days.

Daily backup script

Create /root/backup/scripts/1d.sh with the following contents and make it executable:
rm /root/backup/files/complete*
tar -czf /root/backup/files/complete.tar.gz /etc/ /home/ /srv/ /var/ 2> /dev/null
lftp ftp://#username#:#password#@#host# -e "put /root/backup/files/complete.tar.gz; quit"

This creates a full daily backup of the important files of your server. That complete backup is then copied to an external FTP server. That way you can access your backup even if the whole machine becomes inaccessible. You may need to install the lftp program if it’s not on your machine by default.

You don’t need to create separate MySQL dumps. The MySQL data are stored in the /var structure, in my case under /var/lib/mysql/#database#.

Google is working on an ad-serving platform for the masses. The so-called Google Ad Manager, currently in private beta, is aimed at small and medium-sized companies, creating a counterpart to DoubleClick’s DART.

The service is going to be free. The underlying purpose of Google Ad Manager is the further spread of AdSense on publisher sites. Just like Google Analytics is supposed to help AdWords clients optimizing their campaigns, Ad Manager is supposed to help AdSense clients to deliver more ads and collect more information about your site.

Today I received a couple of my emails telling me that all posts of this blog were deleted. At first I thought people were kidding but then I got really scared. At first I thought somebody had hacked into my WordPress. But I always update all my blogs on the same day a new WordPress version comes out.

It turned out that the MySQL table containing the posts crashed. The MySQL log told me that by post table “is marked as crashed and should be repaired”. Great! But a little bit of research solved the problem. You need to go to the corresponding MySQL database directory, for example /var/lib/mysql/wordpress, and execute the following commands as root:

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
myisamchk -r wp_posts.MYI
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Problem solved within a few seconds. If that hadn’t worked I would have used my backups that are created hourly. Let me know if I should write something about backup strategies for standard root servers too.

Affiliateboy Markus Kellermann, Head of Affiliate Marketing at explido WebMarketing, writes that affiliate network belboon is about to introduce a post-view tracking solution. Apparently they will be counting conversions within 24 hours after the impression of a creative in favor of the affiliate. Let’s wait for the official release.